On 8/9/2024 7:31 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Fri, 9 Aug 2024 11:26:06 -0400, DFS wrote:
>
>> Why foreign FOSS developers get away with such unfair and
>> anticompetitive activity in the US I don't know.
>
> It’s so unfair.

I'd love to see the look on your face when your boss drags some FOSS
dreg into your cube and says "Quan will do your job for free. Thanks
for your service. Security is here to escort you out."

Would you like that? Would that be fair?

Later than night you're curled up in the fetal position on the living
room floor, sobbing and cursing Stallman.

> It’s like the US cannot make its own FOSS.

FOSS can be and is contributed to by everyone in the world, so you'd
think it would be the best software on the planet. But it's often the
worst, or faintly praised as 'good for being free of cost'

Photoshop is doomed by Gimp.

On Sat, 10 Aug 2024 11:54:48 -0400, DFS wrote:

> On 8/9/2024 7:31 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Fri, 9 Aug 2024 11:26:06 -0400, DFS wrote:
>>
>>> Why foreign FOSS developers get away with such unfair and
>>> anticompetitive activity in the US I don't know.
>>
>> It’s so unfair.
>
> I'd love to see the look on your face when your boss drags some FOSS
> dreg into your cube and says "Quan will do your job for free. Thanks
> for your service. Security is here to escort you out."

Guess what: my career is already built on FOSS. And I come originally from
about the same part of the world that your “Quan” comes from.

Coincidence? You be the judge.

>> It’s like the US cannot make its own FOSS.
>
> FOSS can be and is contributed to by everyone in the world, so you'd
> think it would be the best software on the planet.

By your own admission, it already has the best cost-benefit ratio on the
planet. That’s why it’s pushing aside the proprietary stuff -- in your
words: “dumping”.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> some dumb fsck wrote:
>>
>> I'd love to see the look on your face when your boss drags some FOSS
>> dreg into your cube and says "Quan will do your job for free.

If your boss is replacing you with someone else, that's not free, you
dumb fsck.

>By your own admission, it already has the best cost-benefit ratio on the
>planet.

And the entire planet benefits.

On 8/10/2024 7:10 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Sat, 10 Aug 2024 11:54:48 -0400, DFS wrote:
>
>> On 8/9/2024 7:31 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, 9 Aug 2024 11:26:06 -0400, DFS wrote:
>>>
>>>> Why foreign FOSS developers get away with such unfair and
>>>> anticompetitive activity in the US I don't know.
>>>
>>> It’s so unfair.
>>
>> I'd love to see the look on your face when your boss drags some FOSS
>> dreg into your cube and says "Quan will do your job for free. Thanks
>> for your service. Security is here to escort you out."
>
> Guess what: my career is already built on FOSS.

So you were the FOSS dreg that came in and displaced a commercial
developer for no pay?

Somehow I doubt it.

> And I come originally from
> about the same part of the world that your “Quan” comes from.

You're a Chinese Jew?

> Coincidence? You be the judge.

Quit babbling.

>>> It’s like the US cannot make its own FOSS.
>>
>> FOSS can be and is contributed to by everyone in the world, so you'd
>> think it would be the best software on the planet.
>
> By your own admission, it already has the best cost-benefit ratio on the
> planet. That’s why it’s pushing aside the proprietary stuff -- in your
> words: “dumping”.

It's hard to beat free of cost. But sometimes it's so shitty
(LibreOffice) that it's not a cost worth bearing.

On 2024-08-13 8:58 a.m., DFS wrote:
>> By your own admission, it already has the best cost-benefit ratio on the
>> planet. That’s why it’s pushing aside the proprietary stuff -- in your
>> words: “dumping”.
>
> It's hard to beat free of cost.  But sometimes it's so shitty
> (LibreOffice) that it's not a cost worth bearing.

I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
task for certain things that Excel can easily handle, but it doesn't
seem to be as bad as you claim for most people. Most people don't need
to do the elaborate calculations that you do and consider the suite to
be great.

--
CrudeSausage
Catholic, paleoconservative, Christ is king

On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:40:17 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:

> I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
> task for certain things that Excel can easily handle, but it doesn't
> seem to be as bad as you claim for most people. Most people don't need
> to do the elaborate calculations that you do and consider the suite to
> be great.

DFS probably spent untold hours handcrafting those elaborate calculations
to show Calc's shortcomings like people develop benchmarks to favor a
particular processor.

I can't address the issue since I haven't used a spreadsheet program even
when SuperCalc came bundled on a CP/M machine.

On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:40:17 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:

> I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
> task for certain things that Excel can easily handle ...

Yes, one drawback of LO Calc is that it doesn’t automatically interpret
names of genes as dates. That’s very important in genetics work nowadays.

<https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/08/06/147226>

On 2024-08-13 8:55 p.m., rbowman wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:40:17 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:
>
>> I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
>> task for certain things that Excel can easily handle, but it doesn't
>> seem to be as bad as you claim for most people. Most people don't need
>> to do the elaborate calculations that you do and consider the suite to
>> be great.
>
> DFS probably spent untold hours handcrafting those elaborate calculations
> to show Calc's shortcomings like people develop benchmarks to favor a
> particular processor.
>
> I can't address the issue since I haven't used a spreadsheet program even
> when SuperCalc came bundled on a CP/M machine.

All I can say myself is that when I was looking for a free word
processor to write my university essays back in the 2000s (I could
afford to buy one, I just didn't want to), I would have been happy to
use LibreOffice. I ended up settling for AbiWord that did a wonderful
job. I never had to do any kind of spreadsheets, but I doubt that
LibreOffice Calc would have failed at the task.

--
CrudeSausage
Catholic, paleoconservative, Christ is king

On 2024-08-14, CrudeSausage <crude@sausa.ge> wrote:
> On 2024-08-13 8:58 a.m., DFS wrote:
>>> By your own admission, it already has the best cost-benefit ratio on the
>>> planet. That’s why it’s pushing aside the proprietary stuff -- in your
>>> words: “dumping”.
>>
>> It's hard to beat free of cost.  But sometimes it's so shitty
>> (LibreOffice) that it's not a cost worth bearing.
>
> I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
> task for certain things that Excel can easily handle, but it doesn't
> seem to be as bad as you claim for most people. Most people don't need
> to do the elaborate calculations that you do and consider the suite to
> be great.

The regional print shop I worked for in the 2000s moved us from M$ Office to
OpenOffice and Calc worked fine (even then) for what I needed. Basically I
just cleaned up Excel spreadsheets, exported to comma delimited files and
imported them into dBase. We also moved away from Outlook for and went to
Opera Browser with its built-in email.

--
[Self-centered, Woke] "pride is a life of self-destructive fakery, an
entrapment to a false and self-created matrix of twisted unreality."
"It was pride that changed angels into devils..." — St. Augustine

On 2024-08-14, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:40:17 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:
>
>> I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
>> task for certain things that Excel can easily handle, but it doesn't
>> seem to be as bad as you claim for most people. Most people don't need
>> to do the elaborate calculations that you do and consider the suite to
>> be great.
>
> DFS probably spent untold hours handcrafting those elaborate calculations
> to show Calc's shortcomings like people develop benchmarks to favor a
> particular processor.
>
> I can't address the issue since I haven't used a spreadsheet program even
> when SuperCalc came bundled on a CP/M machine.

I guess spreadsheets have their place, but just about every spreadsheet I've
seen would have worked better as a database. Admittedly, I never was in
accounting.

--
[Self-centered, Woke] "pride is a life of self-destructive fakery, an
entrapment to a false and self-created matrix of twisted unreality."
"It was pride that changed angels into devils..." — St. Augustine

On 2024-08-14, CrudeSausage <crude@sausa.ge> wrote:
> On 2024-08-13 8:55 p.m., rbowman wrote:
>> On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:40:17 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:
>>
>>> I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
>>> task for certain things that Excel can easily handle, but it doesn't
>>> seem to be as bad as you claim for most people. Most people don't need
>>> to do the elaborate calculations that you do and consider the suite to
>>> be great.
>>
>> DFS probably spent untold hours handcrafting those elaborate calculations
>> to show Calc's shortcomings like people develop benchmarks to favor a
>> particular processor.
>>
>> I can't address the issue since I haven't used a spreadsheet program even
>> when SuperCalc came bundled on a CP/M machine.
>
> All I can say myself is that when I was looking for a free word
> processor to write my university essays back in the 2000s (I could
> afford to buy one, I just didn't want to), I would have been happy to
> use LibreOffice. I ended up settling for AbiWord that did a wonderful
> job. I never had to do any kind of spreadsheets, but I doubt that
> LibreOffice Calc would have failed at the task.

I installed and tried AbiWord recently. It's a lot slicker than it was a few
years ago.

--
[Self-centered, Woke] "pride is a life of self-destructive fakery, an
entrapment to a false and self-created matrix of twisted unreality."
"It was pride that changed angels into devils..." — St. Augustine

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 08:30:57 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:

> All I can say myself is that when I was looking for a free word
> processor to write my university essays back in the 2000s (I could
> afford to buy one, I just didn't want to), I would have been happy to
> use LibreOffice. I ended up settling for AbiWord that did a wonderful
> job. I never had to do any kind of spreadsheets, but I doubt that
> LibreOffice Calc would have failed at the task.

My university essays were written with a pen or sometimes a manual
typewriter. Word processors were in the far future. The first one I ran
into was WordStar on a CP/M system that I used as a programming editor.

At that point in life I had little need for prettily formatted documents
so I never learned to use them. My forays into trying to edit with
LibreOffice usually end in disaster as I get into some sort of automatic
bullet point hell that I can't get out of.

On 8/13/2024 8:40 PM, CrudeSausage wrote:
> On 2024-08-13 8:58 a.m., DFS wrote:
>>> By your own admission, it already has the best cost-benefit ratio on the
>>> planet. That’s why it’s pushing aside the proprietary stuff -- in your
>>> words: “dumping”.
>>
>> It's hard to beat free of cost.  But sometimes it's so shitty
>> (LibreOffice) that it's not a cost worth bearing.
>
> I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
> task for certain things that Excel can easily handle, but it doesn't > seem to be as bad as you claim for most people. Most people don't need
> to do the elaborate calculations that you do and consider the suite to
> be great.

Some very uninformed people may consider LO great, but only because they
don't understand or haven't required the power of MS Office.

But there's no denying LO has long had more features than 95% of users
will ever need.

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:40:17 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:
>
>> I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
>> task for certain things that Excel can easily handle, but it doesn't
>> seem to be as bad as you claim for most people. Most people don't need
>> to do the elaborate calculations that you do and consider the suite to
>> be great.
>
> DFS probably spent untold hours handcrafting those elaborate calculations
> to show Calc's shortcomings like people develop benchmarks to favor a
> particular processor.
>
> I can't address the issue since I haven't used a spreadsheet program even
> when SuperCalc came bundled on a CP/M machine.

Excel has had a history of calculation errors. It also tries to handle
gigantic spreadsheets that no human being except the original author could
understand, or gigantic data sets better implement by a database.

One thing besides data I like to use spreadsheets for: documents with little
tables. Merged cells containing paragraphs.

--
Hope that the day after you die is a nice day.

rbowman wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 08:30:57 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:
>
>> All I can say myself is that when I was looking for a free word
>> processor to write my university essays back in the 2000s (I could
>> afford to buy one, I just didn't want to), I would have been happy to
>> use LibreOffice. I ended up settling for AbiWord that did a wonderful
>> job. I never had to do any kind of spreadsheets, but I doubt that
>> LibreOffice Calc would have failed at the task.
>
> My university essays were written with a pen or sometimes a manual
> typewriter. Word processors were in the far future. The first one I ran
> into was WordStar on a CP/M system that I used as a programming editor.
>
> At that point in life I had little need for prettily formatted documents
> so I never learned to use them. My forays into trying to edit with
> LibreOffice usually end in disaster as I get into some sort of automatic
> bullet point hell that I can't get out of.

Circa 1984 I wrote my disseration using a DEC terminal, a program called
Ed or somesuch (a line editor kind of like the ed mode in vi), and a program
called DPS (Document Processing System) which was like a combo of RUNOFF and
TeX. There was a big laser printer to print the document.

The Gollumm-like creature who vetted dissertations said that I really knew
how to make it work (according to her strict standards). Mainly because I was
careful to add a large number of conditional hyphens to avoid wide-spaced
justification.

--
Q: What looks like a cat, flies like a bat, brays like a donkey, and
plays like a monkey?
A: Nothing.

CrudeSausage wrote:

> some dumb fsck wrote:
>>
>> It's hard to beat free of cost.  But sometimes it's so shitty
>> (LibreOffice) that it's not a cost worth bearing.
>
>I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
>task for certain things that Excel can easily handle, but it doesn't
>seem to be as bad as you claim for most people. Most people don't need
>to do the elaborate calculations that you do and consider the suite to
>be great.

Most people don't need the "high end" product, in any market that I
can think of. Most will get a much better value with a cheaper, "good
enough" product.

--
"The HUGE majority use MSO and are happy." - "True Linux advocate"
Hadron Quark

On 2024-08-14 6:43 p.m., chrisv wrote:
> CrudeSausage wrote:
>
>> some dumb fsck wrote:
>>>
>>> It's hard to beat free of cost.  But sometimes it's so shitty
>>> (LibreOffice) that it's not a cost worth bearing.
>>
>> I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
>> task for certain things that Excel can easily handle, but it doesn't
>> seem to be as bad as you claim for most people. Most people don't need
>> to do the elaborate calculations that you do and consider the suite to
>> be great.
>
> Most people don't need the "high end" product, in any market that I
> can think of. Most will get a much better value with a cheaper, "good
> enough" product.

Exactly. I don't have any benefit to using Microsoft Office 2021 for
example, but it is definitely helpful if ever I want to send documents
to my students since they wouldn't know how to open an .ODT file even if
I provided them with detailed instructions. I could have opted to just
install the Office 365 software my workplace provides for free, but I
was very uncomfortable with the idea that they had even a fraction of
control over my hardware in exchange for my decision to install the
suite. Either way, it's there for when I need it.

I have, however, completely removed Microsoft Edge and any other
unnecessary Microsoft software from this Windows 11 installation. I've
also blocked Google as result of their decision to censor Steven Crowder
on their own platform and bully Rumble to get rid of him on theirs by
threatening to pull ads entirely through their connection with companies
responsible for 90% of them. I used to feel that it was fair for me to
see an ad or two in exchange for the "free" content. At this point, I
don't want to see the ads or the content at all, not even accidentally.
Fuck 'em. Revo Uninstaller Pro does a _wonderful_ job of getting rid of
the fat.

--
CrudeSausage
Catholic, paleoconservative, Christ is king

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 14:50:31 -0400, DFS wrote:

> Some very uninformed people may consider LO great, but only because they
> don't understand or haven't required the power of MS Office.

Let’s just say, for the one, you pay money to have restrictions put on
you, while with the other, you can save money and have those restrictions
lifted.

We all know what kind of choice people will make, don’t we?

On 8/13/2024 8:55 PM, rbowman wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Aug 2024 20:40:17 -0400, CrudeSausage wrote:
>
>> I know that you've demonstrated LibreOffice Calc not being up to the
>> task for certain things that Excel can easily handle, but it doesn't
>> seem to be as bad as you claim for most people. Most people don't need
>> to do the elaborate calculations that you do and consider the suite to
>> be great.
>
> DFS probably spent untold hours handcrafting those elaborate calculations
> to show Calc's shortcomings like people develop benchmarks to favor a
> particular processor.

I haven't spent much time comparing Excel to Calc, but in my work life I
did develop a variety of sophisticated Excel spreadsheets - containing
VBA and forms and interoperability with other Office components - that
were and still are impossible to replicate in LO Calc.

No need for me to gin up biased comparisons; sometimes FOSS just can't
compete, even after decades of trying.

> I can't address the issue since I haven't used a spreadsheet program
> even when SuperCalc came bundled on a CP/M machine.

"I can't remember if I've ever seen a spreadsheet used as a
spreadsheet." - rbowman

How is that possible? They're EVERYWHERE in the business office.

I was using spreadsheets with calculations and macro code nearly 40
years ago (Lotus 1-2-3 in 1985).

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 20:04:22 -0400, DFS wrote:

> "I can't remember if I've ever seen a spreadsheet used as a
> spreadsheet." - rbowman
>
> How is that possible? They're EVERYWHERE in the business office.
>
> I was using spreadsheets with calculations and macro code nearly 40
> years ago (Lotus 1-2-3 in 1985).

Ah, but I've never worked in a business office... The drones in HR or
accounting did all that stuff. Even when I was a consultant I could make
out a quarterly without a spreadsheet.

Where I do see them used is as a lazy way to submit a RFP or requirements
document. The first column is sort of like a paragraph heading and the
rest of the columns are stream of consciousness attribute as they dream
them up. The rows have no relationship, and the columns are unique to
whatever thing they are describing. It's all text with no logical or
mathematical relationship.

I'm certainly not saying real Excel spreadsheets don't exist, only that
I've never seen one with formulas to calculate cells etc in my world. The
closest I've come is working with Power BI:

https://datascientest.com/en/excel-vs-power-bi-what-are-the-differences

DAX, no surprise, incoporated some Excel features, no surprise being a MS
program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Analysis_Expressions

I do have to admit that if you want to generate pretty pictures for
management Power BI is one of the more intuitive apps that I found.

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 20:04:22 -0400, DFS wrote:

> ... sophisticated Excel spreadsheets ...

Oxymoron, much?

<https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=excel+versus+pandas>

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 14:50:31 -0400, DFS wrote:

> Some very uninformed people may consider LO great, but only because they
> don't understand or haven't required the power of MS Office.
>
> But there's no denying LO has long had more features than 95% of users
> will ever need.

That is equivalent to saying people consider Access great only because
they don't understand or haven't required to power of PostgreSQL.

On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 16:51:48 -0400, Chris Ahlstrom wrote:

> One thing besides data I like to use spreadsheets for: documents with
> little tables. Merged cells containing paragraphs.

Yup. In my life that's all I see.

On 15 Aug 2024 02:36:33 GMT, rbowman wrote:

> Where I do see [Excel spreadsheets] used is as a lazy way to submit a
> RFP or requirements document. The first column is sort of like a
> paragraph heading and the rest of the columns are stream of
> consciousness attribute as they dream them up. The rows have no
> relationship, and the columns are unique to whatever thing they are
> describing. It's all text with no logical or mathematical relationship.

The irony of this is there were alternatives to spreadsheets, back in the
early days, that moved a bit away from the rigid row/column layout, that
would have been better for this sort of task. But they all went extinct
before the Microsoft juggernaut.

For example, there was this Mac program called “Trapeze”, which billed
itself as the “desktop publishing spreadsheet”. You could put blocks of
cells anywhere on the page, and lay them out how you want. I think it
could also place text blocks around those cells.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote this copyrighted missive and expects royalties:

> On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 14:50:31 -0400, DFS wrote:
>
>> Some very uninformed people may consider LO great, but only because they
>> don't understand or haven't required the power of MS Office.

With great power comes great.... headaches.

Most people could get by with Wordpad.

> Let’s just say, for the one, you pay money to have restrictions put on
> you, while with the other, you can save money and have those restrictions
> lifted.
>
> We all know what kind of choice people will make, don’t we?

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Feature_Comparison:_LibreOffice_-_Microsoft_Office

:-D Lotsa red in both columns. Lotsa "partials" too.

I find both word processors to be clumsy, just in different ways. For a large
document, I'm using LaTeX and latexmk.

--
Q. Why are women top-heavy.
A. It makes the easier to push over.